


The Doctor and Agent O

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Wound-Tending, cuts and bruises, mild peril and all-but vanilla sex, smoking mention, spies guns bombs, the Master has had...a lot of fun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:01:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24497620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: Of course they didn't just text. Of course someone was going to get hurt.The Doctor and O run into unpleasantness on Her Majesty's [n.b. Unauthorised! Completely unauthorised! --C.] secret service. She thinks she knows him. She's sure he understands her, which is irresistible and uncomfortable and can only lead to trouble.
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 69





	The Doctor and Agent O

There are things she doesn’t want to notice about O, but notices anyway. 

For instance: the way his hands shake when he draws his little match box out of his pocket, dispenses his single matchstick into his waiting palm, and strikes the match, which bursts into heat and light and the scent of phosphorus. The tremor transfers itself to the head of the match, to the flame itself, stuttering its way to his face, and to the cigarette after he has lit it and discarded the match and removed the cigarette from his mouth, exhaling noxious smoke into the grey, damp air coming off the choppy Thames. 

He looks wrong, somehow, smoking a cigarette. The Doctor wrinkles her nose at him, disapproving.

“Those things will kill humans,” she says. 

“I’m all right,” he says. 

Also: the way his hands don’t shake at all when they’re holding a gun, or pointing a gun, or firing a gun. It’ll be the training, that’s what does it; the scripted steps make the steadied nerve, the determinism of the practiced body, like a program built to function independent of its host’s hesitations. 

The Doctor doesn't approve of this either, this part of O’s job. She prefers him safe behind the analyst’s desk, using that clever brain of his, because it _is_ clever, so clever, so bright, and it would really bother her to see it ruined by violence.

He’s all smiling delight as they work out a problem together, glancing at her askance time and again through the discretion of his inclined head and his long eyelashes. She’s delighted too: at the easy synchronicity between them, the fluidity of the mental rhythm, passing thought and idea back and forth with thrilling speed as they huddle side by side between cramped banks of hot equipment in the back of a surveillance van. 

She knows how much it would please him to see the inside of her TARDIS, even while she makes excuses to herself not to let him have a look. 

O is too interested, too eager. She’s seen the way a light comes into his wide eyes, sudden and intense, fascinated and full of keen insight. She knows he’s curious, she knows she could impress him, but she keeps their friendship contained, a series of encounters within a narrow, specific context. She drops in on him. She lends a hand with his work, dips into his life. She texts him, learns to WhatsApp.

She’s aware of his growing Doctor file. Tells herself it’s just one of his many dossiers on alien life on Earth, part of the personal project unendorsed and derided by his colleagues at MI6. She's read his, it seems only fair. She never verifies his theories. She has a team, a fam, other friends with whom she handles extraterrestrial things. O is separate. O is different. 

Already, O knows her and understands her too well. He’d met her before she was her, saw with ease through the superficial changes that she was still the Doctor—and with equal facility how all the things that made her still the Doctor didn’t mean that she hadn’t also become someone else entirely. 

He’d accepted her with hardly a blink, said he was used to people being other people. Secret identities, he said, weren’t so much disguises as other faces of yourself, facets, fictions that were allowed to act in reality, and what was a fiction really but the truth under the humdrum details? 

That was what he did, look under the details, under the fiction. He was a master at donning fresh identities, too, he quipped. One day, he might even let her see his collection of false beards. 

The details of O are this: every name they have for him is a form of mockery. He’s always watching, always alone. His thoroughness is a kind of burden. There are times she catches him taking too long to answer, or looking at nothing, or staring, as though he's away, missing beats—or hearing other ones. 

Sometimes his eyes are sad, in a way she thinks she’s seen before, in a mirror. Often, though, they’re smiling, their corners crinkling at her like she’s said something wonderful. Half the things he texts to her are puzzles. The other half make her laugh. When they met, O had glared up at the Doctor when the Doctor had wanted to disregard him, and now she never would. 

He hadn’t seemed smaller than the Doctor then, and he certainly doesn’t seem that way now, when she no longer has an advantage of height over him and can’t look down at him as she did before. She keeps having to remind herself, in a way that’s never happened to her with other persons taller and bigger, that her reflexes are still faster, her body more powerful, her Time Lord advantages mean she retains the unequal upper hand and must be more careful with him.

They’re crouched in a warehouse at night, under fire. It’s all chilly concrete and dusty cardboard, grey blocks in the dim light punctuated by the white, sharp sparks of ignited gunpowder. The open shelving and the long, straight rows make for poor cover, and the best they can do is to keep moving, hunched behind the boxed goods, to evade the systematic search. 

It’s dangerous, but there’s a part of each of them, she’s sure, that’s exhilarated. 

They glance at each other, and it’s like they’ve planned it. They rise as one in the pause not so much understood as felt; together, they make a dash for it. Of course they’re hand in hand. That’s just how she is, with her friends. 

Someone lobs an explosive at them. She sees it coming out of the shadows, ready to go off. As it bounces and rolls towards them, she can see how it will burst when it detonates, how fast and how hot and in which directions the twisted metal and the fire inside will fly, and exactly what damage it will do. How much damage it will do to slower, more fragile bodies.

She twitches her hand. They throw themselves to one side. 

But as the explosion fills the space where they had been, slamming cold air ahead of hot, she finds that O is shielding her. He’s covered her chest with his, his back between her and the heat and the shrapnel. He’s pinned her arms. He should have shut his eyes, and so should she, but they’re staring at one other. The fire’s reflection flares in his corneas and probably in hers—irises reacting involuntarily to the sudden brightness, a flash and then gone again. 

He’s there long enough for her to feel his weight, too sharply aware of the warmth and the electromagnetism of his body, too cognisant of his awareness of her own, long enough for her to wish she’d been the one doing the shielding, though such a thing would never have occurred to her, to the Doctor. 

They’re caught and thrown into a holding cell, and after she’s done negotiating with empty air and inspecting every corner of the narrow space and the two bare cots that fill it, she sits opposite him and finally takes notice of the way his knuckles are clasped very close in front of his mouth, the taut line of his arms where he’s propped them on his knees, his sleeves pushed to the elbows, and the restlessness of his gaze, looking at one thing and then another and then the first again, blinking; at the cell door, the wall, the ceiling.

“We should try to rest,” she says, “probably. They won’t be coming until morning. Probably.”

O’s hand goes to his temple; his fingers thread through his hair. “I don’t like enclosed spaces,” he explains, even his tone constrained. His mouth is tight.

“Don’t look at the cell,” the Doctor says. “Look at me. You’ll get through this. We’ll get through it together.”

They lie facing each other on the camp beds. The clouds of their breath meet and mingle. They’re front to front, an arm’s length apart and straight as planks, his eyes shining and fevered or almost fervent in the near-dark. When he reaches out to touch her hair, and she lets him, his hand doesn’t shake, then, either. 

She’s looking mostly at his lifted shoulder and the inside of his elbow and then on the standing-up hairs on his arm. He searches her face. His disquiet is a third person in the little room, pacing over their heads.

“You’re just like you are in the reports, you know,” he says at last. “But...is it difficult, changing so absolutely? To be vulnerable where you were used to being strong? To suddenly be slight, stooped, hiding what you are now under those big clothes, even from yourself, only to be reminded at the most surprising times? I’m sorry if that’s impertinent. You used to be so stern, and now… I wonder if you really know who you are.”

“I’m still strong,” she protests, because as it turns out the differences aren’t really better or worse, though she feels it in her centre of balance, her shoulders, her thighs, her spine, her skin. Everywhere. “My people—”

“—are enlightened?” Something like bitterness passes across his face, strange to see on him, and gone before she’s even tried to decipher it. “Humans aren’t, so much, and you seem to spend a lot of time with humans.”

“You will be,” she says with the old confidence. 

“If you say so.”

“I know it. I’ve seen it! Thousands of years from now, humans won’t care about those distinctions. They’ll celebrate them. They’ll create more. But most importantly they’ll exult in the sheer joy of all the kinds of humanity possible.”

“Are you celebrating it? You’re not in control of the process, from what I understand.”

The Doctor hesitates. _Yes_ , she wants to say to him, _I am. I’ve wanted this_. But it’s true, she does forget, only to be reminded at the most inconvenient times. It’s true, though she calls it an upgrade, sometimes it is frustrating. She does hide. She wants to go on, same as ever, and sometimes it feels like she’s just pretending, just playing a role she thinks she remembers, one that’s become a step too distant, no longer quite accessible, if it ever was. 

It’s not because she’s a _woman_ , though, is it? 

_You haven’t bothered to think about it very much, have you, dear? In fact, I’d say you’ve been trying_ oh _so very hard not to. You never have been very good at this, even when we were little boys._

It’s only her imagination chastising her in that familiar, teasing voice. The Doctor had thought, a long time ago, that maybe, one day, they’d think about it together, that Missy would show her, much like this. It had been a foolish dream, though it lingers and appears, the way dreams do. 

But the Doctor is startled by the image that comes suddenly and so vividly to her mind, not of Missy, but of O in Missy’s place, his leg between her thighs pushing up and grinding against what she’s missing, what she’s gained, his hand on her chest. Touching everything she hasn’t, grasping, insistent. 

Her breath catches, though she suppresses its sharpness just in time to curb its cutting. She pulls back gingerly, just out of reach. O’s eyes slide slowly from her, but then he drops his arm, polite and mild, and he's quiet after that. 

She watches him sleep; she doesn't need it, herself. He sleeps with his arms folded, his forehead bunched, strained and hunched as though he were propping up the building his spine is backed against. It doesn't look restful, hardly like sleep at all. 

Eventually, she sits up. Slips out of her coat and drapes it over O’s torso and legs. He must be cold, and she doesn't need the jacket any more than she needs the sleep, or any of the rest of it, all the things that make him human, and that make her different, other, alien. 

In the morning, they take him. 

He is the spy, he’s the one they recognise from their database; this warehouse infiltration is part of his adventure, not of hers. If they have a record on the Doctor, almost certainly the photograph is long out of date. O is on his feet and at the doorway before she is, straightening the collar of his shirt as though preparing for a business meeting, meeting their captors before she can step in and interpose herself. 

Still, it feels like she's failed in her responsibilities, like she's allowed herself to be jostled out of her role. O’s habit of protecting her can't be good for him. It never goes well when people do that. This upside-down order of things sits uneasily, and she doesn't know what to do when she’s left behind alone, once again unable to do anything but pace and wait. 

It’s worse, much, much worse when she hears the cry: a ricochet down the hollow corridor, just once, too sustained—then abruptly cut off. 

It's his voice. Not as she ever expected it to sound. It brings her head up, and she stares long and blindly, straining to listen and hearing nothing that tells her anything. 

Hours later, they finally bring him back, and they seem full of consternation as they shove him into the cell. He slides down the cinderblock and slumps against it, silent, eyes closed, pulling her coat over himself. She tries to help him, to see what's been done to him; she wants to _do_ something about it, but he won't let her touch him, and she doesn't really know how. 

The next morning, when they come for him, she makes a fuss. She's rewarded with a sharp backhanded slap, and while she reels, they drag him away again. 

“What do they want?” she asks that night. 

“To cow. To beat.” His eyes go somewhere else. A muscle in his jaw tightens. “To punish. You’re not the only one I’m not meant to be watching.”

“So no one at MI6 knows about this.”

“No one cares what I'm pursuing. Why do you think I haven’t got any backup?”

“You have me. I care.”

O looks at her, finally. He looks at her for a long time. 

“Yes,” he says, “I have you.”

Third morning, she’s working up once and for all to put a stop to this, these big men with their cruel hands snatching her friend away to hurt him, when he starts to laugh. It's an uncanny, wild chuckle, out of place and without cause, and it doesn’t seem as though it’s part of O at all. He’s lurking in the shadow of the open door and this laugh is a shadow thing that clings and drips and contains something too proud in it, something a very little bit like...pleasure?

It distracts her and draws their attention. 

“Pervert,” they mutter, and then their hands are on his shoulders, and he’s stumbling out of the dark, glancing back at her, O again, checking that she’s all right, making sure that she’ll stay put. 

After that, they don’t bring him back. 

After that, she escapes. 

She’s wreaking frantic havoc in the dark when she finds him, free and doing the same. He grins at her, all glinting eyes and bared teeth. In the corridor behind them both, there’s fire. There’s shouting, disorder, chaos, not all that far away. 

O twists his neck and adjusts his shoulders, fiercely pleased. He’s got a gun, and she knows it’s been used, and she knows that as much as he likes to protest that he’s only a desk agent, when the time came, he picked it up to use it, and it wasn’t just about training. The Doctor tries to disapprove, but she sees the dark stain down the side of his shirt and she remembers the way he’d moved in their cell at night and thinks that maybe, this once, she won’t.

O has a safe house in a flat by the sea. It’s high up a tower block that rises solid and singular above a faded promenade. The window they don’t open looks out on winter water, tan and lime and dusty blue in a light shallow and overshadowed. The waves are close-set, moving fast from a great way out. The sky, in the early hours, had been a formless white, feeling its way along the seafront to envelop the colours on the signs in the street below. Now, far out to sea, clouds make a sooty band and the water is in shadow. 

Behind friable blinds, there’s a fold-up dining set and a peeling kitchen. The corners and crevices smell of salt air. The lights work, and there are tins and boxes in the cupboards. There’s a full kit of first aid supplies for an extensive and alarming range of contingencies, clean clothes, a computer and a phone, top up cards in a box in a drawer. 

She’s done exploring and begun to wonder if it’s appropriate to be bored long before O has finished checking his security and setting up at the table his assortment of packets and bottles. The antiseptic splashes as he pours it into a dish, and he lets the bottle slip out of his hand onto the table. 

The Doctor doesn’t mean to search out the bruises across his ribs and stare at the cuts along his torso, but she’s glimpsed them already, dark and discoloured between the open panels of his ruined shirt. O still won’t let the Doctor touch him as he examines his wounds, angled away from her on one of the chairs, though she’s crouched near, full of concern and guilt. 

But he sighs. He prepares a piece of cotton gauze, and he hands it to her, presenting to her that part of his flank that is almost his back, tricky for him to reach. Startled, she stares, watching the movement of his skin as he inhales and exhales. 

He prompts her with a grunt, and she brings the bit of fabric to a laceration, cold, clean cloth to hot wound, covering the fissure of the split in the skin. He stiffens at the contact. She works her way around his body in slow increments, stinging him clean; he sits still and almost formal, careful under her touch. 

The bruises are shadows, some like the edges of stains on the cover of a book hurt by flood; some fresher, mottled, overlapping. The cuts are sticky and rough and wet. They open and close like mouths, clinging to the fabric as he shrugs his shirt from his shoulders and drops it to the floor. She wants suddenly to brush her fingers across them and silence them. She wants to match her lips to the lips of his wounds, one and then the next and the next, following them like the stations of a constellation. 

It’s a shock of a thought, and she shies from it. Her mind’s quick to supply her with memory: Missy’s hands on slack, abraded skin, sharp and soft and swift, her little nails on the ends of small, curved fingers, raking ribs, digging into the hair at the Doctor’s chest, drawing blood where she retraced new wounds and old wounds and remembered ones, making him shiver. She’d wrapped her hands around his head and guided him between her legs, where, still shivering, he’d kissed her until she’d danced. 

Always before that, time and time again, the Master’s mouth on the Doctor’s body, the Doctor writhing, his skin just damp enough to conduct the energy between them, crackling—this is the touch the Doctor knows. 

And...she wants to kiss _these_ wounds and see them writhe; she wants a mouth to do the same to her. Another memory: the thing in O’s eyes the first time they’d met, a need then that the Doctor hadn’t wanted to recognise. 

He watches her now, and as before she thinks he knows too much. He seems to know everything, and to be cataloguing everything, and it’s excruciating, and because she can’t be captured like this, not by him, she tears herself away, turning her eyes and averting her face and twisting her shoulders.

But O does catch her, his grip firm around her forearm. She could extract herself from his grasp easily. Instead, she lets him pull her in. He takes the stained gauze out of her fingers and presses her palm against his ribs, the largest liver-coloured bruise spilling out past its edges. 

Caught between his hand and his chest, the Doctor can feel her pulses, her blood rushing and tumbling all the way through her to the capillaries of her fingers and turning back again, as though trying and failing over and over to make the leap across the void into O’s body, to touch him wholly, to stop holding back. 

“Come on,” he says, with the smallest shake of his head. “You can’t hurt me.”

“Of course I can hurt you!”

“But you wouldn’t.” A flash of teeth, and if she didn’t know better, she’d say his trust was a kind of dare. “Anyway, I’m already in pain. How much worse could it get?”

And this, which should be a joke, which sounds like a joke, isn’t one at all. The Doctor is wide-eyed with confusion, tensing to back away and surprised to realise her hand is still splayed across his rib cage as it expands and contracts with his breath, brushing his skin against her fingertips. 

As though without willing it, she tightens her hand so that her fingers press into the yellowed flesh, and past it to the furrows of his ribs, hard bone that nonetheless speak of their flexibility, their obliging, endless give, and his ribs are like the waves in this planet’s oceans, and not so unlike her own, though what they shelter might not be exactly the same. 

Outside, real waves criss-cross as lacy rough. She can hear the slap of water and the current of the wind, driving the mist and riling up the sea. There’ll be a winter storm coming. The surf will slam into the sea wall and explode high and breaking onto the pier. 

On Gallifrey, you could find waves in the rock as regular and alive as the ones that skim over water here. She leans in to her touch and traces the buried corrugations, searching like she's searching under the land. 

O smiles then, incongruously sweet. He picks up the bowl with his blood diluted in surgical spirit and he takes her hand again and he dips her fingertips in it, trails them through that cold solution and draws them out and gives them a shake so that watery pink droplets fly from them and fall. They’re still dripping as he isolates a finger and places the pad of it on a bleeding cut and traces along the gleaming length of it. 

There's a rough edge to his voice when he says, _now, Doctor_ , and it seems that the only thing that it makes sense to do is to do just what she’d wanted, to bend her head and put her mouth to his body, anywhere it’s broken, everywhere it’s open to her. 

He doesn’t writhe, and he doesn’t shiver, but his breath deepens, ragged like his voice, and his hands do shake when he tucks her hair behind her ear so that with the tremor he brushes and sets into motion the fine chain on her ornamentation, and also when he reaches for the fastening of his trousers to loosen them and push them past his hips, it takes him a moment longer with the button than it should. 

O’s taste is comfortable and easy; not so alien as all that. There’s the iron of his blood, and salt, and the bitter alcohol, and chemical residue, days-old from the explosive device. There’s the same stale smell she’s carried from their cell, trapped in the fibers of their clothes. Beyond these things, he’s almost familiar, which she suddenly knows she’d anticipated and which she chooses also not to notice. 

She follows a long welt like a gash in the ground that, running parallel to the jut of his hip, passes from sight in the dark silken tumble of his hair. His hair is matted and glistening where the line cuts into its hidden terminus. 

She knows how to do this part: she presses her lips to his shaft. She uses her tongue on his head. He draws in a breath. She touches him with less certainty than she otherwise might have because she remembers that she can’t make the leap into his body without making the leap into his mind. 

She closes her eyes to imagine what it would be like to feel what he’s feeling. To inhabit his muscles and his bones, his cautious, unusual stillness and his expectant acquiescence; to fit the skin that’s flayed with injury, injury and the sensation of her breath across its taut and aching surface. When she glances up to see how she’s doing, she finds him watching her, serious and concentrating, his eyes warm, bright though the room’s dimming behind him with the gathering cloud.

O takes her hand and raises her up to him. She’s wearing everything except her coat, and his clothes are around his knees. He reaches for her braces and stops with his palm over her breast, lets out an amused, soundless puff of air, fingering the fitted bands beneath her shirt. Still, he pushes the braces from her shoulders to get her out of her capris, and still he maneuvers her knees to either side of his legs, and then he waits, his hand smoothing circles around her lower back and bottom. 

But this part is something else, and she hesitates, and she's afraid he’ll be able to see why, however patient he is. So she straddles him and positions him beneath her, and for a long time after that she's busy thinking about the mechanics involved, her attention on her own body and on the puzzle of convincing it to perform. 

In the background, the wind’s whistle keeps its rising and falling, faltering rhythm with her.

He must be able to tell; in some busy subsection of her mind she's already putting together the things she might say to him about the newness of this body and the experience she doesn't have. Yet even as she's thinking it through, she knows she’d only be explaining away to divert him from the other thing. Instead, she’s silent, moving up and down over him with all her determination, working them closer a little at a time.

“Is it true,” he asks her finally, intuitively, making her hold still though not quite lifting her away, “that you’re a telepath? And if it is true, does that...have implications?”

Panic at being discovered flushes through her, and it must be obvious on her face. “I—yes, but not like this,” she says, knowing she can’t evade O and his research and his insight. 

He frowns. “I think you mean, not with me. Are we so unalike?”

She doesn’t want to answer. 

His face falls, or darkens. “You _could_ do it, if you wanted to.”

Maybe it’s obvious, too, how much this won’t work for her unless she does.

Again, O frowns. “And you won’t.”

The Doctor cringes. When she brings herself to answer, her voice is low. “I do want to...but I won’t. It wouldn't be right.”

There's a heavy pause. “You're still stern,” he says, very quietly. “I was mistaken.” His hands move away from her until they drop half-clenched at his sides.

“No—!”

She's managed to get him inside of her, barely, and he's still hard, and she isn't willing to give up like this. She grasps at the memory of what Missy would have done, mounted. It's her only experience, but it's just enough—she’ll use the pleasure of being under her, and Missy’s pleasure, too.

The Doctor moves again above O, and it is or it isn't the Missy in her who can’t help but return to the open gash across his chest and curl her nails into the unmarred flesh beside it. It seems to be the right thing to do. O grabs her arms, and it feels good to be struggling, to be opposing supports exerting force across a structure in this building gale. 

They move against each other, their bodies meet, and had she even been looking him in the eye before? He holds her gaze now, and it's such a deep look, it's _almost_ like being in his head. 

The chair clatters, hard edges dig into her knees; she's balanced precariously on its perimeter, now he's bucking upwards with his hips. It's all sensation, first only of the full, hard fact of him moving in her, and then in an instant’s snapping into place, of her nerve endings firing, her tissues flushing, oxygenating, tightening, the pleasurable exertion spreading to her legs and into her abdomen, as though she's been running for the sheer enjoyment of it. 

Though it's lonely, only feeling the half of this that's hers, it heightens her perception of what she _can_ access. It makes her pulse race with the spine-tingling rush of flinging herself without a failsafe into the unknown of open space, precipitous—like talking into a microphone and hoping he's listening and hearing only her own voice, which she's casting into the blind, howling distance between them, and trusting that by the message that comes back, she’ll know him. 

It’s a feeling that shouts, vying with the kick of thunder.

O, who understands her, lets the question of the telepathy go. Would it really be so unethical, she wonders, is that really the reason she won't touch him with her mind? Or is it that he’s a stranger in her long and alien life, and she’s trying to keep him that way, and she’s afraid? 

She’s still strong, but she’s always been vulnerable.

There's another determinism of the body, structural rather than habitual. The Doctor has come up against it often after a regeneration: the inclinations of the form apply. In this one she's watchful, in this one she looks for cues. When O tips his head back, when his breath picks up speed and he gets hotter all over, she flushes too. It doesn’t matter that he’s thrusting a little too hard, and it’s actually helpful that his nails, which are _sharp_ , are digging into her thighs. Her hand goes to his shoulder, and she’s sure she’s clasping too tight. His whole body tenses, and she releases him in a hurry.

She grabs onto the back of the chair to stop herself grabbing his head. She _isn’t_ , she’s _not going to_ —she won’t do that to him, won’t push that on him, even if he’s asked—that intimacy— 

A door opens in her and the ocean rushes in. The wave—she breaks on him, like a wave, and fills the room. The bowl and the bottle wash away, dashed to the floor, the table upended. Vapor swells around them, mixing heady with the pounding that gradually fades from her head.

The wind is blustering now and rattling the window. O’s breath is audible through the din. She can hear her own hearts, too, doubly loud like they’re trying to drown out the squall. He blinks up at her and she lets go of the chair, her hands stiff with gripping. He holds his arm gingerly.

She’s instantly guilty. “I've hurt your shoulder.”

He shakes his head. “I was wounded already. Though I will concede that you've deepened the bruising. You don't usually do this with humans, do you?”

“I don't do this at all, usually. Why, can you tell?”

O smiles. “No, I'm flattered. That you trusted me.” He takes her hands in his and rubs his thumbs over the backs of them, considering them. 

“Of course I trust you.”

He tilts his face and widens his eyes and nods. “You know I’m a spy. I spy on you. I have an entire shelf of material all about you.”

The Doctor tilts her face too, playing. “Is it good? I bet it’s good.”

O ducks his head. “It's very juicy. Would you like to see it?” 

“Are you taking notes now?”

He bites his lip, coy and sly and soft. “I keep a notebook in my pocket.”

But the beginning of rain splatters the glass; the room is suddenly wet, obscure, chilly. When she picks herself up off him, a distance comes back between them, as though they’re both suddenly remembering who they are and who they should be to one another. She reaches for her trousers. O goes to the window to check on the storm sweeping in from the sea. 

“Rough weather. Might have to hole up here for a while.” He bounces softly on his feet, looking out. The sudden bright instant of lightning highlights his features in unnatural silver.

The Doctor would like to draw him from the window. “I love the seaside,” she says by way of conversation. “We don’t have any oceans where I come from.”

O turns back to her, leaning, arms folded—still unclothed, but then, humans are funny that way—against the window frame. “What do you have?”

“Mountains. Desert. Desert mountains.”

O laughs, and it’s so normal, even in this gloom, it’d be reward enough. “I take it it was arid, then?”

“I came from a scrubland, but later… There’s a kind of mountain where it never rains, but sometimes when the wind blows, it picks up the snow at the summit and tosses it about, and all the while it’s falling, you know that the snow’s been on the mountain since before your ancestors built the city in which you live.”

“Wow. That’s beautiful. Did you come up with that?”

“Ah, no. Not exactly. It’s something a friend said once. Loved that landscape, more than any other, my friend: loved the whole austere alpine tundra, rocky glacial moraine, once-a-century desert bloom thing.”

The Doctor pretends not to notice, but does, O mouthing the words ‘once-a-century desert bloom thing’ after her. 

But then he catches her with his inquisitive and incisive look. “But not you?”

“I wanted to run away too much. I wanted to get out into space and explore.”

“Still. It must have been worth loving.”

Still. After more than an entire life, she still doesn’t know how she feels about her own world, as though even the stone and the grass and the silver trees can't quite welcome her the way they would the Master, who belongs to them so truly, though they’ve spent exactly as long in exile. 

“If nothing else, because it’s your home.”

The Doctor shrugs, a little helpless. “It’s where I come from,” she admits. 

After a time, she sees the movement of O’s throat as he swallows.

O understands her; doesn’t he? He knows what it’s like not to fit fully in a world, to always look to the horizon, to the thing beyond. To be uncomfortable in a body, whatever body that is, whatever it’s pretending at, whatever it’s learned to do, even when sometimes it’s sublime and does sublime things, like survive and feel and allow her to touch someone she cares about. To be uneasy in a self. To cling to that self, and cast away that self, and then grasp on to it again. In his own way, he must know—she’s sure of it—what it is to live like that.

It’s what she recognises in him. 

There are things the Doctor notices about O—pauses, lingering looks, a strangeness like he’s coming loose—but doesn’t choose to. There are things she wants to be true about him, about his cleverness and his goodness and the way the skin creases around the sides of his eyes when he smiles. When he looks at her, the Doctor wonders what it would be like to let him see her, and longs to cross that last distance, even while she knows that she never could. 

Under the story, under the skin, the Doctor’s Time Lord hearts beat, pulsing waves through her Time Lord blood. She’s tasted O’s blood from his skin, and that is the closest she’ll come to him. There are things the Doctor notices about O but won’t interrogate. He’s darker, even brighter, more vulnerable than she would like to think. 

Secret identities are protections, and they both have selves to protect, people they want and have to be. Legends are chosen out of necessities. There’s her name, and there’s his; there’s their names on each other’s tongues. They’re not so different—maybe—or they’re entirely alien or there’s some other truth, and it’s the truth of her, the truth of him. 

The Doctor goes to stand with O at the window to look out at the rain. Breakers blow across the surface of the world. It’s cold by the window, but O doesn’t shiver. He lets his arms fall to his sides. She touches her fingers to his palm, and it is a necessary mystery, when she moves to take his hand, whether or not their hands will shake.


End file.
